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3. Primary Ross/Reeves interface

As with the initial encounter between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Michelangelo – to which it has often been compared – the bare physical facts of the first meeting between Jonathan Ross and Vic Reeves are a matter of historical record. It was the start of the second series of The Last Resort in the autumn of 1987, and after the runaway success of his début season, Jonathan Ross was looking around for fresh inspiration in the midst of a ‘horrible second album moment’.

His brother Adam, who was running a club called The Swag at Gossips in Soho at the time, had mentioned a ‘slightly crazy DJ guy…the only person he knew who admitted to liking prog-rock when no one else would even acknowledge that stuff. He’d put on a record like “Alright Now” by Free and mime to it while wearing a horse-brass round his neck.’

When Ross senior discovered that this individual also did ‘strange paintings of Elvis’, his curiosity was definitely piqued. A meeting was set up at a Japanese restaurant in Brewer Street, where Reeves would bring his pictures and Ross would pick up the tab. Fifteen years later, the latter remembers the occasion in tones endearingly reminiscent of one of those scenes in a TV dating show where someone goes to the toilet between the starter and the main course to tell the cameras how it’s going.

‘I liked the way he looked,’ Ross remembers. ‘I liked what he’d done with his hair – he was the first person I’d seen with what was sort of the George Clooney cut. I’d always been interested in the evolution of male style but never really had the courage to do anything about it. Jim [it is a tribute to the power of the Vic Reeves persona that even people who know him really well seem slightly uneasy about using the name on his birth certificate] certainly led the way there.²⁰

‘I’d never seen anyone who was quite so comfortable about looking ridiculous for the sake of style,’ Ross continues, ‘which is something I deeply admire in people – that almost complete sublimation of the ego in pursuit of “the look”. He was wearing all black, and he had his hair done very short. He looked great and very unusual – kind of like a mod, but those early ones who were inspired by the American beats. Anyway, it was a very interesting look and I knew he’d done it consciously, so that really impressed me.’

What was the atmosphere like between the two of them? ‘It was reasonably friendly, but a little awkward. I was slightly embarrassed at the time about the way people might perceive me as being the epitome of Thatcher’s young man. I suppose it was because of the shoulder pads—shoulder pads equating in a post-Dynasty kind of way with flash and success. Anyway, I was very conscious of going out of my way not to seem like that person.’

And yet Ross felt comfortable buying two paintings (for a hundred pounds each, though Vic only asked for ten) on the spot – one of which featured Elvis ironing Tommy Trinder’s trousers?

‘I do remember thinking immediately afterwards, I hope I haven’t offended him in some way. I was always concerned about the north-south thing as well…especially back then. It was very important at that stage for any vaguely sensitive southerner not to act like a prick in any way to do with money or status or feeling proud of being brought up in the nation’s capital city when in the company of northern gentlemen.’

Vic and Bob seem to have had a talent for reflecting this feeling back at people. ‘Yes, but very nicely, never in an anti-southern kind of way…It was almost a casual acknowledgement of who they were. One of the things that always really attracted me to them was that they were clearly from the north-east, yet it wasn’t like “Hello, we’re northerners, look at us”. Their unapologetic use of phrases and terms that either were peculiar to their region, or seemed like they might be to people from the south, made the whole thing feel kind of true, even when it was anything but.’

Ross first encountered the two of them together a few months after the Brewer Street meeting, when he went down to see Vic DJ-ing at Gossips. ‘There were about three people in the audience and some bloke pretending to be a playboy singing “I’m the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo”. Bob turned up afterwards and I assumed he and Vic were a gay couple, because they seemed quite tender with each other. Bob was concerned that it hadn’t gone well and I didn’t understand that they worked together, I just thought, Oh, he’s gay and this is his little partner. So when Vic said “I’m doing a thing with Bob” I just thought “Oh fuck, it’s a Linda McCartney situation”. But of course, it wasn’t.’

Right from the start of his own TV career, Ross seemed keen to rehabilitate British comedy’s old guard – the Frankie Howerds and Sid Jameses – who had fallen by the ideological wayside in the 1980s.²¹ Was one of the things that impressed him about Vic Reeves the way he seemed to be referring to a pre-alternative tradition?

‘I think early on I was just struck by his originality and his fearlessness…the way he presented himself as an exotic figure, not so much in terms of being from the north-east, just in a kind of “Hello,I’m Spike Milligan’s illegitimate son” sort of way. It’s just that unique manner Vic has of observing things and presenting himself…It’s not so much courage, because courage is when you know that you might fail. It’s more like an insane confidence in his own world view.’

2. Seven days in the sitcom wilderness: ‘Listen very carefully, I will say this only once’

There’s a great bit in Graham McCann’s 1998 biography of More-cambe and Wise where, as a means of establishing the weight of expectation resting upon his subjects’ disastrous 1954 small-screen début Running Wild (the one which caused the People’s television critic to pen the somewhat premature epitaph ‘Definition of the week. “TV”: the box in which they buried Eric and Ernie’), the author outlines the other entertainment on offer on Britain’s only small-screen channel on the night Morecambe and Wise staked their first claim on the medium. Bear in mind that this was a time when, in McCann’s suitably austere phrase, ‘Hours of viewing, like public drinking, were limited in the interests of temperance’. Thus, the early evening newsreel was followed by the rather Reevesian-sounding Coracle Carnival (with its exciting coverage of people paddling up and down a river in Roman-style boats). Then came that eternal televisual staple, ‘Association Football’ (Aldershot versus the Army), followed by Gravelhanger, a drama so bad it made Heartbeat look like a mouth-watering prospect. The ill-fated Running Wild was next up, before the evening reached a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion with a discussion of the situation in Indo-China, followed by the national anthem.

There would seem to be plenty of ammunition here for those who claim that the now unthinkably large audiences often cited as evidence of the superiority of previous generations of TV were actually just a result of there not being anything else on. Yet Running Wild got dreadful viewing figures with no competition, while more than half the nation would watch Morecambe and Wise Christmas shows a couple of decades later when it had two (count them, two) other channels to choose from.

Anyway, to extend the reach of McCann’s licensed-premises-based viewing metaphor, British TV at the start of the 1990s had left behind the old Scottish Highlands and Islands Keep the Lord’s Day Special scenario, but was still a long way shy of the non-stop twenty-four-hour lock-in that would be the digital epoch. In short, this was an era of limited Sunday opening and the occasional late-night extension.

What we really need to help us understand the dramatic impact of Vic Reeves Big Night Out is some kind of contemporary record of 1990’s primitive entertainment landscape. A diary, say, of a whole week’s worth of British sitcoms in that last grim Thatcherite winter…Thank goodness I kept one!²²

Friday, 21 February

‘Allo ‘Allo

This failsafe blend of Carry On-style innuendo and hoary World War II stereotype has entered the national subconscious at such a high level that it’s hard to know what to think about it. Except that the catch-phrase ‘Listen very carefully, I will say this only once’ will be remembered long after ‘Alb ‘Allo’s source material – late-seventies BBC drama series Secret Army – has faded from the collective memory. And that the only way to truly grasp this show’s ethical daring is to imagine the likely tabloid reaction to a French TV network essaying a comedy series about the humorous experiences of British prisoners in a Japanese POW camp.

Watching

Once the impact of its punkily downbeat theme tune (‘It was boredom at first sight, he was no one’s Mr Right’) has worn off, this amiable chunk of Scouse whimsy actually puts together its clichéd ingredients (interfering mother and put-upon only son) in a modestly charming way. Tonight, chirpy Brenda and her lovably gormless motor mechanic boyfriend Malcolm indulged in a bit of furtive courting aboard a friend’s beached pleasure craft, and were surprised when the tide came in and they had to be rescued by a lifeboat. Malcolm’s last line – ‘Nothing ever happens’ – made the influence of Samuel Beckett even more explicit than it was already.

Home To Roost

It’s hard to believe that this depressing rubbish with John Thaw and Reece Dinsdale in it is actually churned out by the same writer (Eric Chappell) who brought us the immortal Rising Damp. And yet, it is.

Colin’s Sandwich

Even those who have never previously harboured warm feelings towards Mel Smith have to admit that this is quite good. The prevailing mood of world-weary cynicism recalls the great early days of Shelley, and by working through its desire to use the word ‘buttocks’ in its opening few moments, tonight’s edition freed itself from that perennial concern to become genuinely humane. The man whose attempts to take control of his own life are constantly thwarted by his own essential decency, yet he can’t help speaking his mind however horrific the situation he has become enmeshed in, is a perennial theme of all great drama, from Hamlet to Ever Decreasing Circles.

Saturday, 22 February

Not traditionally a big night for sitcoms. Luckily, Keith Barron will soon be back on our screens in Haggard.

Sunday, 23 February

You Rang, Milord

Jimmy Perry and David Croft generously stage a benefit night for all their old characters. Lord George and the Honourable Teddy are the same as they were in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, but in different clothes. Paul Shane, Su Pollard and the other one are the same as they were in Hi-de-Hi but in different clothes. The air raid warden in Dad’s Army is the same as he was in Dad’s Army but in different clothes. The story is Upstairs Downstairs-style class war but played for laughs, which ought to have been a winning formula, but unaccountably – despite the plentiful opportunities for whisky watering and chamber pots – the whole thing looks a bit tired. In a footnote of modest historical interest, the comedy lesbian is played by one Katherine Rabett, who – had the cookie of royal libido crumbled a little differently – could quite easily have ended up as the Duchess of York.

The Two Of Us

Disgusting piece of Thatcherite slop in which ‘Ashley’ and ‘Elaine’ (played by Nicholas Lyndhurst – unwisely striving to shrug off the sacred mantle of Rodney in Only Fools and Horses— and the evocatively named Janet Dibley) are a wildly unappealing upwardly mobile couple, currently endeavouring to become entrepreneurs by running a pizza joint in the evenings. Any kind of manual work in a sitcom like this is, it must be remembered, side-splittingly hilarious. ‘I wanted a leather-topped desk and a BMW, not a tin of olives and a moped,’ Ashley moaned tonight to great audience hilarity. As if all this, another interfering mother and (this is the modern world after all) a businessman with a mobile phone weren’t enough, this week’s episode also found room for a cameo appearance from Simon Schatzberger, deeply loathed star of the ‘French polisher?…It’s just possible you could save my life’ Yellow Pages ad.

Monday, 24 February

Desmond’s

The fact that the only other non-white character in this entire week of British sitcom is a woman in the dentist’s waiting room in Thursday’s début edition of One Foot in the Grave gives some indication of the burden of representation Trix Worrell’s Peck-ham Rye barber’s shop comedy has to carry. In these circumstances, occasional lapses into the all-singing all-dancing tendencies of The Cosby Show are probably understandable. The comedy African is quite funny, too.

Tuesday, 25 February

Chelmsford 123

In which Jimmy Mulville shows that he still has some way to go before he can truly be considered the Tim Brooke Taylor of his generation.

After Henry

For reasons known only to themselves, ITV considered the return of After Henry an event of sufficient significance to merit the front page of the TV Times.23 In truth it is slightly better scripted than most of its rivals in the hegemonic middle-class-parents-cope-with-grown-up-children-and-demanding-mother genre, but when Prunella Scales says ‘After Henry confirms my theory that all the best comedy is based on pain’, she really is not kidding.

Porridge

Manna from heaven. In tonight’s repeated episode, ‘Poetic Justice’, the magistrate responsible for Fletcher’s incarceration found himself behind bars for bribery and corruption and sharing a cell with the man he sentenced. ‘How do you think I feel,’ he demands in a fine example of the celebrated Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais technique of natural justice through paradox, ‘being sent down by a crook like me?’

Wednesday, 26 February

By some completely unprecedented scheduling oversight, there are at present no British sitcoms on a Wednesday evening, but it cannot be very long before someone chooses a common saying in everyday use, cuts off its second half (Too Many Cooks…A Stitch in Time…It’s an Ill Wind…), finds a comedy location – motorway service station, taxidermists, baked bean factory – adds an interfering mother, someone with a car phone, and three grown-up children, and remembers that trousers are funny, and there we’ll have it. ITV, 8.30 p.m., and June Whitfield’s our uncle.

Thursday, 27 February

May To December

Anton Rodgers, the poor man’s William Gaunt, plays the middle-aged solicitor who is – horror of horrors, call out the militia and phone D. H. Lawrence – going out with someone quite a lot younger than him. Worse still, her name is Zoe Angel…and as for the comedy cockney secretary and her hilarious marijuana plant, let us draw a discreet veil over her (and it). It would be all too easy at this point to lament the passing of a halcyon epoch of situation comedy, but the harsh truth is that for every Steptoe…there has probably always been a Mind Your Language.

One Foot in the Grave

David Renwick’s suburban revenge comedy is the rarest of contemporary phenomena – an entertaining new sitcom with funny jokes in it. Victor Meldrew (played by the excellent Richard Wilson of Only When I Laugh and Tutti Frutti renown) is an irascible retired security guard who vents his considerable spleen on children, men with walking sticks, and toilet rolls whose perforations don’t coincide. Tonight he was in hospital with unexplained stomach pains and found himself having his pubic hair shaved by an escaped lunatic called Mr Brocklebank. Later on, when asked by a passing Conservative candidate for his vote in a forthcoming by-election, he gestured towards his genital region and proclaimed ‘I’d sooner stick it in a pan of boiling chip fat’. Last, and perhaps best of all, came this explanation for chronic insomnia: ‘How can I go to sleep?’ Meldrew wonders. ‘Every time I nod off, I have this hideous dream that I’m imprisoned in a lunatic asylum and Arthur Askey is singing underneath the window.’

At this point, the journal ends. But as well as showing just how desperately Vic Reeves Big Night Out was needed, and beyond the eerily prophetic resonance of Victor Meldrew’s dream,²⁴ this grainy snapshot of life before reality TV can also – with the aid of hindsight’s high-powered microscope – be seen to reveal a small-screen comedy world in a fascinating state of flux.

The exhaustion of the classic British sitcom form is made all the more apparent by the grisly spectacle of seventies behemoths trading on past glories. And the advent of One Foot in the Grave – arguably the last in the Dad’s Army/Fawlty Towers/Only Fools and Horses family line of generation-crossing mass-audience sitcoms²⁵ – only further reinforces this sense of transience and impending extinction.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the demographic scale, a lot of the bright young things of what someone with no regard for mythic nomenclature might term the Not the Nine O’Clock News generation were finding that their own performing careers were running out of steam a little earlier than might have been expected. By cunningly diverting their substantial remaining energies into the brave new world of independent production, the Jimmy Mulvilles, Mel Smiths (no one else liked Colin’s Sandwich as much as I did) and Griff Rhys Joneses of the world would snatch success from the jaws of failure via the new empires of Talkback and Hat Trick.²⁶

1. Getting Chiggy with it

‘I remember going down and seeing them at the Deptford Albany,’ says Reeves and Mortimer’s manager Caroline Chignell – universally known as ‘Chiggy’ – of her first sighting of her future clients, ‘and thinking, Oh my God! It was just so different from anything else…Vic and Bob didn’t really come out of the comedy world: what they were doing seemed to be referring more to art and pop traditions. There was a real feeling of a community of artists around them. Yet at the same time, their act seemed to involve all the sorts of things that would make your dad laugh, but done in a really contemporary way.’

In manned space flight, the last-minute pre-launch stages are always especially fraught. And so it proved with the Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory, as the little matter of successfully translating their uniquely deranged equilibrium to TV was very far from being a done deal.

‘There was obviously some irony involved when Vic claimed to be “Britain’s top light entertainer”,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘but he believed it too – and he looked it when he wore a white suit.’

Vic’s early televisual forays on Jonathan Ross’s Last Resort were greeted with a reaction most fairly characterized as general bemusement, but looking back now, there were portents of the greatness to come. When he painted pictures of guests (including punk svengali Malcolm McLaren) on china plates as ‘Lesley Cooper, street artist’, a couple of prescient reprobates ran down out of the audience to steal them. And Vic’s attempts at adding a much-needed touch of class to an ill-fated village-fête-themed show as the bucolic Silas Cloudharvest elicited at least one memorable reaction. (‘I was talking to one of the prop guys afterwards,’ Jonathan Ross remembers fondly, ‘and he said “That farmer was shit: if he hadn’t had that cucumber flute, he’d have died on his arse”.’)

There were, Chiggy remembers, ‘a lot of people sniffing about’ in south-east London in the very late eighties. Whether or not BBC2’s Alan Yentob and Channel 4’s Michael Grade actually did go and see the Big Night Out at Deptford Albany on the same evening in an epic battle for control of the future of British comedy,²⁷ it was the latter (via Ross’s production company, Channel X) who ended up signing the deal.

After an embarrassing episode when Ross and Reeves went to the BBC boss’s house only to find out that he actually wanted Vic to be the host of a new series of Juke Box Jury (a job which his friend and fellow scion of the South London biker underground Jools Holland was happy to take in his stead), it was never really going to be otherwise. The demon Yentob would get his man in the end. But for the moment, everything had turned out for the best. When the Big Night Out finally transferred to TV, the particular circumstances of a newly established independent production company making a show for a young channel would facilitate a level of freedom that a more firmly established institution could never have permitted.²⁸

‘The thing that set the tone,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘was Jim’s absolute control of the visual aspect. Something like that would never be allowed to happen now, but it was his and Bob’s vision entirely – all the sets, all the props, all the costumes…The scripts were all drawings [preserved for posterity in the Penguin book Big Night In] – “shell/bottle lamp with patchwork shade”, “Kleenex/ticker tape”. And it was amazing how literally the people making the props took everything: they were so terrified of accidentally putting down an aubergine rather than a cucumber, or making something blue when it needed to be white.’

Vic and Bob seem to have been quite an intimidating proposition at this stage. ‘They had a very small, close-knit group of friends, and you would not dare ever to even guess what was funny and what wasn’t, or you would land yourself in terrible trouble,’ Chiggy concedes. ‘I don’t think it was just me…I think everyone felt that way.’